I think we're getting the hang of this....keep your fingers crossed!

We've just finished week 3 on the diet and we're all doing pretty well. We're weighing & measuring and writing everything down. With 3 meals & 2 snacks a day, we're using a lot of dishes & a ton of zip lock bags. Thankfully my friend Sara & Debbie each came over on a weekend and helped me get the meals ready for the next week. It was a major help.(BTW, do you know you can buy pasteurized eggs in the shell? I needed them for Ben's eggnog. How do they do that?)It was so nice to be able to grab something quick when Ben was starving or if we were late out the door. I think I'm going to have regular keto cooking sessions with my friends. I'll just have to bribe them with some non-keto food.

Ben was really hungry the first week. He kept asking for more food (even begging for carrots!) and he'd cry when his snack was done b/c he wanted more. One of the worst moments was at church on Sunday when he was so low energy that he actually laid down on the church playground. He was fine, he just didn't have any energy left. I felt so bad for Ben & so guilty. I wanted to call the dietitian and ask for more food but then in true Ben fashion, we had a role reversal on week 2. He didn't want to eat all of his foods and some nights he didn't eat any dinner at all. We didn't make it through one day without Ben refusing some food or a meal. The problem with the Keto diet is that you must eat all the food in each meal. So,I am definitely not going to ask for more food now b/c that'll just be more food to try to get Ben to eat. The keto literature says that the higher you can keep the ketones and the longer you can keep them high, the better chance you have of seizure reduction. And less calories means higher ketones. So unless Ben starts having major energy issues, I think we'll just wait & see.

The good news is that we've been able to keep Ben's ketones Large-XL (the highest on the scale)since he started the diet. And best of all Ben is still seizure free.YEAH! It's been almost a month since his last seizure which is the longest break he's had since last Sept. His Drs are going to let us start weaning off the meds so we are very excited. It's been amazing to see the little improvements in Ben. He's more focused,steadier on his feet and has new words everyday. Yesterday he bit Grace (She bit him first!) and he practically put himself in timeout! It's really going to be incredible seeing Ben come off his meds. We haven't know him without major medications in his system since he was nine months old. Even then he was seizing so frequently and had such developmental delay, we didn't get a good sense of who he was. I can't wait to get to know the real Ben.